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How would you vote in the US presidential elections? Will it be Bernie Sanders, the visionary, Hillary Clinton, the practitioner or Martin O’Malley, the implementor? Introducing my new blog in The Huffington Post called Diary of an Undecided Democrat. You can look forward to further posts on gun control, healthcare and who can resist – Donald Trump. Read the first post and let me know how you would vote. You are welcome to make comments here or better yet, log into Huffington Post through your Facebook account and make comments directly on the article.

Summary: Human rights scrutiny is a necessary component of any effort to ensure that communication technology can be effectively adopted and used. This is particularly true when the means of communication are shut down during a democratic upheaval in one country or cut off for 10 minutes on a television set in another.

The author proposes a model to solve dissemination and access problems based on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. While Autronic AG v. Switzerland stimulates the market to support innovation and dissemination of technology, Khurshid Mustafa and Tarzibachi v. Sweden supports the adoption of that technology without unjustified restriction by the state or private individuals. Together these cases can be interpreted as sending a signal to all innovators, disseminators and users, that no matter what type of communication technology is used, there exists a general right of access to all forms of information.

The European Court of Human Rights oversees the human rights of 800 million Europeans. The Court’s judgments are legally binding on 47 European countries. It is not to be confused with the European Court of Justice which enforces European Union law on the 27 countries which comprise the EU.